Head Hopping

Point of View is one of the trickiest aspects of writing, even for professionals. Deciding who should tell the story (or chapter/scene) can radically change your work. We’ll talk more about the different perspectives and their pros and cons in another post. Today, I want to focus on what can happen after you’ve chosen your POV and accidentally violated it. Editors call it head hopping, and it is a serious bugbear.

What Is Head Hopping?

Simply put, head hopping is when the text provides information that the POV character couldn’t possibly know without being inside someone else’s head. It’s most common in third-person limited writing, but it can happen anywhere. Take the example below:

I saw Caroline across the room smiling to herself as she thought about her upcoming wedding.

The character of I would have no way of knowing what Caroline was thinking about (sans telepathy). Usually, this is a pretty easy thing to fix, either by removing part of the sentence, making it your POV character’s opinion, or changing the scene to reveal the other character’s thoughts. So you could end up with the following.

1. I saw Caroline across the room smiling to herself.  
2. I saw Caroline across the room smiling to herself. She’d been talking about her upcoming wedding nonstop so it didn’t take a genius to guess what she was thinking about.
3. I saw Caroline across the room smiling to herself as she perused the wedding venue fliers we’d been collecting for weeks.
   
4. I saw Caroline across the room smiling to herself. Activating my telepathy, I quickly saw her imagination was in overdrive planning her wedding.
   
   

Any of those examples work fine to describe the scene and avoid explicitly depicting Caroline’s thoughts (except for the telepathy version). You could also include dialogue (shared or overheard) either with Caroline herself or other coworkers who are speculating on her upbeat attitude.

What About Third Person Omniscient?

While this POV does allow head hopping, experienced writers try to avoid doing it too often. The author may choose a couple of characters to bounce between for the whole story, only occasionally showing the thoughts of someone else. Or, they may only show character thoughts for comedy and otherwise stick to observable actions. It’s a challenging balance to strike, and the best advice is to stick to what’s crucial for the story.

What’s Wrong With Head Hopping?

Almost everyone has read a story that contains multiple perspectives. When done right, it’s not head hopping. Some authors switch perspectives at chapter breaks, others at scene breaks. The point is to give the reader long enough to bond with the POV character before yanking them out of that character’s viewpoint.

When head hopping happens within a single sentence, paragraph, or scene, the biggest problem is audience confusion. The reader may have to go back and reread parts to figure out who knows what and when. Even if they can keep it all straight, it can draw attention to the fact that they’re reading. You want them engrossed in the story, not second-guessing the way you wrote it.